


Deranged

by almina



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 00:16:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15351996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almina/pseuds/almina
Summary: Homer Jackson is even weirder than Reid thought, but the possibilities shake Reid to his core.





	Deranged

Reid opened the door to the dead room as Jackson worked at his desk. A shrouded large bellied body lay on the table. It smelled not of decomposition but fecal and fishy. Such things did not bother Jackson. Reid had noticed without comment, that Jackson usually sniffed at bodies, blood, and innards. When he caught Reid's eyes on him, he mentioned that bacteria and poisons have characteristic odors. He laughed as he told of a colleague who sniffed at a cultured plate of typhoid, only to contract the disease. Sniffing is quicker and easier than culturing a pathogen, though there's a downside if you are not careful. Clearly the unconventional approach appealed to Jackson.

Today his American was not sniffing a petri dish. He had a map of London where it crowded the Thames. He smoothed it on the desk in front of him and moved a straight edge across it with his left hand. In his right hand he held a fine gold chain attached to a pretty polished, green stone. A pendulum. Was Jackson actually dowsing a map? Was the United States such a cess pool of superstition, that a physician would use such a method? The pendulum swung. Jackson dotted the map at the ends of the straight edge, then turned the ruler ninety degrees and moved it up the map. The pendulum swung violently; he dotted the map again.

"Hello Reid."

Reid came close and peered at the map.

"What are you doing?"

"Practicing a frontier superstion that has served me well."

Reid was a slave to his curiosity. 

"Tell me.".

"I think that man," jackson gestured to the body on the table," died of water borne illness. Not cholera, I don't catch that underlying sweetish scent in his gut. I am asking my friend here," he touched the pendulum, "where he picked it up." Jackson laid the pendulum on the desk beside the map. He picked a pencil out of the drawer, and using the straight edge, drew two dot to dot straight lines across. the map.

"I'll find the source of this man's infection where the lines intersect."

Jackson tapped the map with the end of his pencil.

"There's a well in a town square that's been there since Elizabethan times so says the map key."

Reid drew his head back, saddened and a little repelled by Jackson's headlong descent into the dark ages. 

"I'm going there to get water to culture. Why the long face Reid? I haven't lost my mind."

Jackson wrapped half a dozen stoppered test tubes, and two small round bottom flasks in soft sterilized cotton and put them into his equipment kit. He put the folded map in his pocket. He hailed one of the cabs that milled past the station. As he settled into the seat, Reid climbed into the hansom cab with him.

"Let me guess. You are curious about the pathogen I will culture from the well I marked on the map, and you want to be certain that I got it from there, rather than taking second culture from that dead man, just so I can say I told you so, when the cultures turn out to be the same bacillus."

"It crossed my mind," Reid said. 

"You be of little faith."

With half an hour of a pleasant early afternoon ride and they arrived near the well in the center of a square. Reid paid the driver the fare and extra to hold the cab for their return. Jackson saw women pumping water from the well and horses drinking from the trough beside it. A farmers' market extended from the north edge of the square to within yards of the trough. Jackson watched a woman carry a poke full of collards straight from the market tent and wash them in the trough. A bay draft horse tried to grab a mouthful of them. She let the beast have a leaf and stroked its neck. Jackson hurried to the woman and asked where she got those fine looking collards. Jackson could be charming when it was to his purpose; the matronly housewife blushed when she pointed out a stand a few strides from them. "Good >vegetables there but they're covered with field dirt and filth I will not take into my house."

" Wise woman," Jackson said.

He touched his hat as he thanked her. Then he headed to the stand she indicated. He returned to the hansom with an armload of chard, collards and spinach wrapped in newspaper. 

"I was blind and now I see," Jackson sang in a fine true baritone as he got into the hansom and sat beside Reid.

"What is it you now see?"

"The source of the dead man's illness. You can rest easy Reid. If it were cholera,this square would be empty. I thought it was water borne but it is likely Shigella, a bacillus a very intelligent Japanese man discovered. It contaminates vegetables and vegetable dishes and sometimes water. This area is piped so people are not getting the bacteria from the well unless they drink straight out of the trough. It's a strange disease, sometimes deadly, sometimes merely inconvenient, sometimes unnoticed. The man in our dead room ate uncooked vegetables. That's what I found in his stomach. Barely chewed but he has no molars left. A lot of people like raw vegetables and much of the time they are no worse for it. But that man on the table was no longer young, likely had an ongoing disease, maybe early stage consumption and eating contaminated vegetables finished him. Human waste contamination, which is how Shigella is transmitted. I mean who's going to break off his field work just to go to the privy? "

Jackson reached to pay the cabbie when they arrived at the station but Reid beat him to it. Jackson smiled. 

"T'was a delight taking a turn through our fair Whitechapel with you." Jackson's tone hit an indeterminate ground between flirtation and sarcasm.

Once inside the dead room, which Jackson preferred to think of as a laboratory, he soaked the vegetables in water and inoculated nutrient broth plates with that water. He put drops of it on a microscope slide, put a slip over it, and looked for rods. Nada. He would have to stain the specimen.. He was getting old, his vision was failing. In medical school he had been able to see protozoa bare eye, no microscope.

The stained rods showed brown, and yes he recognized it, hello Shigella, we've met before. He went to the chill cabinet and took out the specimens from his current patient. Dead though the man was, Jackson liked thinking of the people on on the table as patients he could help. He put the older specimen under the scope, and yes they were so alike, even to the dispersion of the rods. Reid appeared. How quiet he was for a big man; he appeared as if he had materialized at Jackson's side. 

Jackson got out of his chair,"here, have a look." Reid took his glasses from his pocket and looked into the microscope eyepiece.

"The one you are looking at I collected from his bowel yesterday" 

Jackson removed that slide and put another on the microscope stage. "See, same bacillus. Though these two slides do not prove that the guy contracted it from the market place vegetables or even that it was this bacteria that killed him".'

"No," It amused Reid to hear Jackson now apply rigorous logic to the situation. " It doesn't prove it," Reid said. "but it is remarkable that you could so quickly find a likely source of the bacillus that killed this man." 

"We'll look at that question first. Was it Shigella that killed him?"

Jackson pulled the shroud sheet down to the man's waist. "See how dehydrated he is?" 

Jackson pushed at the skin which crumpled like parchment under his finger tip.

"And how pale, even for a corpse The worst cases of Shigella present as watery diarrhea that goes bloody. No stopping it. No point in pulling up your pants. Heard about this from some of the field docs who served in the War of the Rebellion though at the time they could not put a name to the ailment. Infected people couldn't hold anything down. You could not replace all the fluid they were shitting out. Men bled out in hours."

Reid glanced at the man on the table. "The report said he fainted in the street and died on the way to the hospital." 

"That fits with the disease, blood volume way down, can't raise your head without seeing stars."

Reid was taking this in. Once again, almost against his will, Jackson had impressed him.

Jackson touched the pretty stone of the pendulum. "Does it bother you that I use this?"

" I shudder to think of testifying in court that I found a piece of evidence by witching for it. Still it's not unethical as beating testimony out of a prisoner."

"Well I'm about to use it again." Jackson picked up the pendulum. "Where are my gloves?," He addressed it as if it were animate.

The pendulum hung straight down. "Are they in this building?" The pendulum swung forward and back. 

"That's a yes," Jackson said, so perhaps Reid would understand and get that 'dealing with the heathen' expression off his face.

"Show me," Jackson said. The pendulum swung toward the door of the dead room. Jackson stood up and moved in that direction. Reid stared. Was Jackson drunk and having him on?

The pendulum directed Jackson to the front desk. 

"Do you have a packet for me?" Jackson said.

"It would have been delivered to the dead room," Artherton said.

"There's something for me in the heap," Jackson said with perfect assurance.

Artherton's eyes met Reid's in sympathy for having to deal with the American. He sighed and riffled through the envelopes. 

"You're right," he said, his voice full of surprise as he handed Jackson a small but thick and rigid package. Jackson nodded to Artherton, all civility, but unable to keep the pleasure of being right out of his expression.

"I ordered some surgical gloves from a firm in the States. I don't mind putting my hands on and in bodies. I can tell so much by touch as well as sight. But I don't want to risk infecting a patient with pathogens from the people I examine in the dead room. You can culture bacteria off freshly washed hands. I checked that myself."

Jackson headed back to the dead room to store his specially ordered, custom made and expensive surgical gloves. Reid trailed him.

"Tell me you knew the packet had arrived before this magic act."

"No Reid. I knew it should arrive sometime this month. The pendulum is just an easy way to find things, lost glasses, lost puppies, a yes or a no when that can answer a question. It can take you to a spot on a map. My old man dowsed for water when the well went dry. Most farmers do that or they call on someone who can. Superstition it may be, but it works." Jackson added

Reid was in that uncomfortable place between belief and disbelief. Jackson decided to leave him there.

They did not speak of the matter for days. As Jackson dissected around the transected aorta of Whitechapel's most recent murder victim, Reid showed up in the dead room and asked a most uncharacteristic question.

"How soon will you finish here?"

"Pretty soon. This is one of those sweet cases that is exactly what it appears to be. Murder. Intentional, lying in wait murder. No defense wounds on his hands or arms. Someone up and slit his aorta, Dead before he hit the ground."

"I'll wait."

What was on Reid's mind? Jackson closed up the man with wide spaced unsightly stitches that would not be seen when he was laid out for mourners. The suturing would hold his belly closed only until after burial. Jackson wheeled the murder victim to the cooler. He noticed that Reid started to follow him. What could be so urgent?

"Okay Reid, out with it."

"I received a message from Fred Abberline. He has lost a watch fob, something that would be of no concern, except that it was a gift from his grandniece. Last year I met the child, very small, rather plain, eery intelligence, an adult trapped in that child's body. Fred adores her." 

Jackson thought he picked up on Reid's concern, it resonated with him, a girl child who owned her papa's heart and soul.

"Where's that?" Reid held up his hand thumb and forefinger together as if he were working a pendulum. "Will you?"

Jackson took the pendulum from his pocket and held it up, tantalizing Reid.

"No, I will not, Reid. You will. Time you learn to witch for answers."

He handed Reid the pendulum. The inspector held it as he had seen Jackson do it but he was at a loss as to how to proceed. 

"Think about what you are looking for."

"The fob is ceramic in the shape of an aardvark, the kind of thing child would choose. A child did choose it." 

"Just let it hang for a moment. "is it in this building? Ask it."

Reid looked as if he felt foolish. "Is the fob in this building?"

The pendulum swung back and forth.

"That's a yes for most people. Ask it if we are in the dead room so you can see what a yes looks like"

"Are Jackson and I in the dead room? I can't believe I am doing this."

"Do it anyway," Jackson said.

The pendulum swung back and forth, Yes.

Reid nodded. He would humor it.

"Is it in the lobby?" 

The pendulum swung side to side.

"I guess that's a no," Jackson said. 

Reid was concentrating, thinking how to query the pendulum. 

"Where is it in this building?" 

The pendulum twisted in Reid's fingers. It swung toward Reid's office.

"It has a will of its own," he said.

Jackson knew Reid was not about to be seen following the pendulum across the lobby. No how, no way.

"Is it in my office?" Reid said. 

Yes. 

So Jackson followed Reid to the inspector's office. Reid closed the blinds so he would have privacy for his dive into the medieval.

Jackson put his hand on Reid's shoulder.

"I will not guide you, but physical contact with someone who knows what he is doing speeds things up. It's how I learned." 

Reid moved the pendulum over his desk. No reaction. He moved it over the wastebasket and it came alive.

"I looked there. It was logical to think it had fallen on the waste paper without noise."

Reid came round the desk and went to his knees. 

"It insists," he said. He reached into the wastebasket. Jackson thought that must be hard on a fastidious creature like Reid. Some people used wastebaskets as spittoons. Reid braced his arm on the desk as he rummaged through the waste papers. Even with his arm braced, the pendulum in his hand swung more as he cleared out paper. 

"Ah ha." Reid's fingers closed on the fob. He held it up and yes, it did look like something that would appeal to a child. An aardvark with giraffe spots. 

Jackson felt the tremor in Reid's shoulder. Reid's mouth was open, he was a little breathless, manic. Jackson long thought Reid was childlike in his beliefs holding them with absolute certitude. It was cataclysmic for him to see one proven wrong. 

"I was wrong," he said, "but it knew. Perhaps I've gone mad."

"No. It's just your first successful witching."

Reid picked through a stack of maps on a shelf by his desk. Jackson went to the door. Who knew what work Whitechapel would give him tonight? He wanted to tidy the dead room and write up the autopsy report for the murder victim. 

"No," Reid said, his voice sharp. "You're with me." 

He was flattening a map on his desk. The Thames snaked across it. Reid laid a straight edge across the side of the map. 

"Come here." Jackson stood beside him. Reid grasped his wrist and put Jackson's hand on his shoulder. "Maintain contact while I search." 

Reid's eyes shone. The pendulum trembled as his fingers did. Jackson bit back questions. Are you looking for the Ripper or for your daughter?. Mention Reid's girl to him and you would get that icy look that could make the strongest man think he was in danger. But wouldn't Reid mention the Ripper if he were on his trail? Reid radiated joy. The pendulum swung at the edge of the river. He dotted the edges of the map and turned the ruler as if he had been dowsing maps all his life. He moved the straight edge up the paper. The pendulum swung as if it were trying to escape Reid's fingers. He dotted the map again, then drew the lines. He had needed only to see Jackson do it, needed only to see Jackson's success and he was afire with hope. He would find his Mathilda. This method worked where logic and diligence failed. 

Reid put his finger on the intersection. "I know this place, only a stone's throw from here, a curio shop."

He folded the map and put it into his pocket. He strode out into the evening and flagged down a closed coach. He gestured for Jackson to get in first. At the shop, they entered like tentative customers. Reid looked over the room, not at the shelves full of river scavenge. Jackson selected a small pewter cup,offered and paid more money than it was worth. That action would get him license to look everywhere and ask about items they might be holding back for certain customers as if so many buyers flooded into the store these two people could pick and choose the people they would allow to buy their wares. The lady, Clara, took him around a shelf to show him some of the prettier pieces. Jackson saw no sign of a girl child here, no ribbons, no dolls, no toys but he saw drawings tacked to the wall in pleasing arrangement, child's work, but of promising skill. He listened, sorting through street noises, and sounds off the river. If he said he heard a child that would be all Reid would need to tear the place apart. The small room that served as a kitchen was neat , only one unwashed plate with a pretty floral design. 

"Do you have anything upstairs?" Jackson said.

"Only our flat. Feel free to wander. Pick up anything on our shelves." Clara seemed proud of the modest inventory.

Jackson returned to the front of the store. Reid looked sick. He had been so sure. 

Jackson drew Reid outside. The coachman had waited, thank God. Reid was hurt bad. Best for him to hide away.

Reid slumped in the coach, crumpled in the corner like a beaten fighter. 

"Gimme the pendulum," Jackson said. Reid pulled it from his pocket and flung it at Jackson who snagged it out of the air.

Jackson dangled it from his fingers. It began to swing, a counter motion to the rocking of the coach. "She's been there, or is there,Reid."

The pendulum swung from Jackson's fingers. "She's in good health." 

Reid raised his hand as if to wave away Jackson and his damned pendulum. "She'll return to you."

Reid shuddered. 

"Listen to me. There was evidence, material evidence. A plate in their kitchen had bits of citrus fruit and candy and nuts and pastry. Stuff kids like. Expensive stuff. 

Those are poor people. They are spending beyond their means feeding someone who's picky about food." Kid drawings on the wall, not to sell but because someone treasures them."

Every word battered Reid and Jackson talked on without mercy.

"You did witching very well right out of the gate. Beginner's luck. It is accurate much of the time, especially the more you practice. Practice, practice, it's about as inspiring as doing scales on the piano. But it gets to be second nature, so you are no longer surprised when you are right. My pendulum tells me she is there, maybe she lives there, maybe she visits a lot."

Reid shook his head, didn't want to hear more. He shrank into himself. 

"Keep your attention on that shop Reid. You'll find her there. I know it the way you know the Ripper won't be back. Oh, you have to go through the motions of thinking he's lurking out there, you being a conscientious copper and all, what with Abberline's obsessing, but you know Jack won't be back. He won't kill here again and you'll never catch him." 

Reid stared at Jackson. His chest unclenched. His American was deranged, no doubt, but right. How could a whiskey soaked American know him so well?

"That shop is the key. Did you see all the butterflies that guy has under glass? The kid had filled four pages with butterflies, very accurate drawings they were too. A kid, and I would bet it is your girl, who spends a lot of time there. Use any excuse to get in." 

Jackson did not mention the last question he had asked. "Will she stay there until this year is out?"

The pendulum swung side to side - no.


End file.
